Contextual analysis of fluid intelligence

Abstract

The nature of fluid intelligence was investigated by identifying variables that were, and were not, significantly related to this construct. Relevant information was obtained from three sources: reanalyses of data from previous studies, a study in which 791 adults performed storage-plusprocessing working memory tasks, and a study in which 236 adults performed a variety of working memory, updating, and cognitive control tasks. The results suggest that fluid intelligence represents a broad individual difference dimension contributing to diverse types of controlled or effortful processing. The analyses also revealed that very few of the age-related effects on the target variables were statistically independent of effects on established cognitive abilities, which suggests most of the age-related influences on a wide variety of cognitive control variables overlap with age-related influences on cognitive abilities such as fluid intelligence, episodic memory, and perceptual speed.The finding that nearly all cognitive variables are positively related to one another has been described as one of the most replicated results in psychology (cf. Deary, 2000), and one of the most replicated results in research on aging and cognition is that a very large number of cognitive variables are negatively related to adult age (e.g., Salthouse, 2001a;2004;Salthouse, Atkinson & Berish, 2003;Salthouse & Davis, 2006;Salthouse & Ferrer-Caja, 2003). Interestingly, these two sets of results are linked because the degree to which a given cognitive variable is related to other cognitive variables (as reflected by the variable's loading on the first principal component in a principal components analysis) has been found to predict the magnitude of the age correlation on the variable (e.g., Salthouse, 2001a,b, c). To illustrate, in an analysis of 30 different data sets, Salthouse (2001a) found a median rank-order correlation of .80 between a variable's loading on the first principal component and the absolute magnitude of the variable's correlation with age. Another intriguing outcome of these analyses was that the variables with the strongest associations with other variables and the strongest associations with age were frequently measures of reasoning or fluid intelligence (Gf).Relations among cognitive variables are often represented in terms of an organizational structure based on the patterns of correlations. There is considerable agreement that a particularly meaningful correlation-based organization is a hierarchical structure, with observed variables at the lowest level, various cognitive abilities at intermediate levels, and a g factor at the highest level (e.g., Carroll, 1993;Gustafsson, 1988;Jensen, 1998). A consistent finding of analyses investigating where in the hierarchical structure age-related influences operate is the discovery of significant negative relations of age on the highest-order factor in the structure (e.g., Salthouse, 2004;2005a;Salthouse & Ferrer-Caja, 2003). Moreover, these © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights r...

Comparing the Latent Structure of the Children’s Category Test-Level 1 among Young Children and Older Adults: A Preliminary Study

“…This finding is consistent with the general admission in the field of cognitive aging, stating that cognitive functioning declines with aging and fluid intelligence-which is highly related to general reasoning-is among the cognitive abilities that seem to be more affected by age (Baltes, 1997;Moraitou & Efklides, 2012;Salthouse et al, 2008). Taking into account, that the comparison of the CFA models, which were confirmed in the present study, for kindergarten students and old-old adults, indicate a similar pattern in the structure of the CCT-1 as regards the existence of a single general abstraction factor measured by it, on the one hand, and that working memory seems to act as the predictive construct of kindergarten students' fluid intelligence (Demetriou et al, 2013(Demetriou et al, , 2014, on the other, the uniformity of conceptual discrimination and conceptual memory, that was found for the old-old adults, could be attributed to a deficit in their working memory.…”

“…Based, firstly, on findings in the field of cognitive aging, supporting that fluid intelli-gence increases rapidly in the early years of life and declines with aging (Baltes, 1997;Moraitou & Efklides, 2012;Salthouse et al, 2008), and, secondly, on the hypothesis of "retrogenesis", the aim of the present study was the comparison of the, related with fluid intelligence, higher order thinking abilities such as general abstraction and reasoning, between the developing children and the cognitively healthy older adults. The comparison has been conducted through the investigation of the qualitative changes in the latent structure of the CCT-1, from age to age, using CFA.…”

Adaptation, Expertise, and Giftedness: Towards an Understanding of Cortical, Subcortical, and Cerebellar Network Contributions

“…From this, they postulated that performance IQ, rather than verbal IQ, is more closely associated with physiological parameters, such as nerve conduction velocity, and as such is sensitive to the level of axonal myelination. They proposed conducting subsequent studies to address the issue of processing speed specifically, which would be important information as processing speed has been reported as an index of executive efficiency and control [71,72].…”

Contributions of the Individual Differences Approach to Cognitive Aging

“…All of the methods have been used with other data sets, but VCAP has the advantages of including a large sample of adults across a wide and continuous age range who have each performed a total of 16 cognitive tests representing 4 primary cognitive abilities (i.e., memory, speed, reasoning, and space) and an achievement (vocabulary). Details about the cognitive measures, and information about the project participants, are available in prior publications (e.g., Salthouse, 2014;Salthouse, Pink, & Tucker-Drob, 2008).…”